CAPEC Definitions / CAPEC-3

CAPEC-3: Using Leading 'Ghost' Character Sequences to Bypass Input Filters

Some APIs will strip certain leading characters from a string of parameters. An adversary can intentionally introduce leading ghost characters (extra characters that don't affect the validity of the request at the API layer) that enable the input to pass the filters and therefore process the adversary's input. This occurs when the targeted API will accept input data in several syntactic forms and interpret it in the equivalent semantic way, while the filter does not take into account the full spectrum of the syntactic forms acceptable to the targeted API.